“The clonal colony encompasses 43 hectares… weighs nearly 6,000 metric tons… and has over 40,000 stems (trunks), which die individually and are replaced by new stems growing from its roots. The average age of Pando’s stems is 130 years, as indicated by tree rings. The roots are 80,000 years old…. Part of the rationale behind current age estimates for aspen clones is that sexual reproduction is effectively frustrated by Read the rest of this entry »

Is nationalism good or bad? If imperialism is bad, then nationalism is good, right? The short answer is that two wrongs don’t make a right, but, I hear you ask, what about First* Nations in the Americas and other oppressed people?

The guiding principle for deciding whether nationalism is good or bad is the same as in many other cases, so let’s compare.

Resistance to racism doesn’t mean the promotion of a race other than the ruling one. Black lives matter is the idea that black people should be considered equals, that they too matter as much as everyone else. This is a response to unequal living conditions and not the idea that black people are better than others and that therefore black lives should matter more than others. Read the rest of this entry »

“I am not against one nation in particular, but against the general idea of all nations. What is the Nation?

It is the aspect of a whole people as an organized power. This organization incessantly keeps up the insistence of the population on becoming strong and efficient. But this strenuous effort after strength and efficiency drains man’s energy from his higher nature where he is self-sacrificing and creative.

For thereby man’s power of sacrifice is diverted from his ultimate object, which is moral, to the maintenance of this organization, which is mechanical. Yet in this he feels all the satisfaction of moral exaltation and therefore becomes supremely dangerous to humanity. He feels relieved of the urging of his conscience when he can transfer his responsibility to this machine which is the creation of his intellect and not of his complete moral personality.”

“….human beings’ differences are not like the physical barriers of mountains, fixed forever – they are fluid with life’s flow, they are changing their courses and their shapes and volume.”

Marx spoke of kraft and Nietzsche spoke of macht. In English these are both translated as power, which has probably confused some people. Kraft is a material force whereas macht includes e.g. the power to influence others without direct action, like the implicit intimidation of a king or the seductive powers of a beautiful face. The superficial difference is described in terms of Hegelian dialectics as master-slave and bourgeoisie-proletariat respectively. At this level both systems are equally muddled mixes of physical and abstract power. To remedy this I will attempt to be a bit more accurate.

Marx’s theory rests on the very specific idea that material forces emanating from humans define value. Nietzsche speaks of power more generally, but they both have in common the idea of humanity as an essentially distinct part of the universe. They had both read Feuerbach and obviously Darwin’s 1859 book helped shape the zeitgeist. It is apparent to me that Nietzsche’s understanding of evolution is insufficient (and he himself admits to not trying to prove anything) but that’s easy to say in 2017 when many understand evolution a lot better.

I read this article on socialism in 1914 trying to understand why the socialist revolution never happened in the United States or in Western Europe; why, instead of the workers uniting to fight their oppressors, they divided according to their supposed national identities and fought each other; why socialism has been in a steady decline since 1914 (despite the supposed existence of socialism from 1917 until today).

I’ll quote extensively so you won’t have to read it, and I’ll only add a few comments of my own.

“For the leadership of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), undoubtedly the centre of gravity within the International, the vote for war credits was partly justified as a means of entry into the inner sanctum of power: it was hoped that this vote, and in particular the unanimity of the vote, would make the party respectable. Whether or not the SPD succeeded on these terms, the vote certainly killed the Socialist International, and it did so in a way that was immediately recognised by contemporaries as a ‘seminal moment in the history of socialism’”.

”While they were caught unawares by the swift move to war and offered little by way of concrete proposals to stop it, this is perhaps best understood as a function of how they had allowed themselves, prior to 1914, to become enmeshed within what were de facto reformist organisations, albeit reformist organisations that bowed before revolutionary rhetoric… [However, they also] believed their government’s claims that Germany was merely preparing to defend itself from Russian and French aggression”

A subject experiences the universe from a specific point of view. So we have an inwards direction towards the subject and an outwards direction in the opposite direction. In other words we have a from-the-inside-perspective and a from-the-outside-perspective. A subject can never achieve the latter, but let’s start with the insider-view.

When I use my brain to think of something that’s from the inside and when we describe what’s happening in someone else’s brain that’s from the outside. To be more specific let’s think of the description we have of an electron. Electrons orbit a nucleus of protons Read the rest of this entry »

There are two definitions of states. The first, and original, one is the same as the one in the phrase “status quo ante bellum” meaning “the state of things before the war” -> “as before” or “as usual”. The same literal definition is found in a sentence like “Look at the state of your hair, it’s a right mess!” This type of state encompasses the whole of something, it’s a description of the combined state of everything involved; a totality or summation; the sum total.

I’ve written about these concepts in my latest blog posts, but thought I’d explain them shortly in a separate text.

There are no two identical things. If two things were identical in all aspects, including their position in time and space, they would not be two things, they would be the same thing. Yet, without similarities between things, we would not be able to think.

The future nomad is alone, but connected; unique as a whole, united in the specifics. I am able to go wherever I want, there is no property or territory that permanently belongs to someone. I bring advanced technology that lets me survive in any environment but is still light enough for me to carry. There are buildings where millions of people can sleep undisturbed and when they wake up there is food free to eat before they continue their adventures. The big cities are always lit bright as the day, but the sleeping rooms are insulated. The light is just like sunlight in every aspect, expect perhaps in brightness. There’s always pleasant weather here and all the big cities are in the same time zone. Weeks are no longer seven days, because we are no longer forced to work business days and consequently no longer forced to rest on the sabbath. Nighttime only exists in the wilderness, but I am equipped to live in the wilderness. The city is of course also filled with wild nomads, but I make different agreements with people I pass on the street and lions that stalk me on the savannah.

There is still competition for awareness of what is important and urgent (this is called politics). Organizations compete for Read the rest of this entry »

To think of things as commodities is to be part of a religion. This religion took the form of capitalism and dominates society today. Just as metaphysical Christian ideas have real, physical consequences, metaphysical commodity ideas have real, physical consequences. Just as Christian practices reinforce the belief in Christian values, capitalist practices reinforce the belief in commodity values.

Religions have come and gone, but since feudal monarchy was defeated in 1918, capitalism has ruled over all incompatible worldviews. The commodification of the planet is increasing as is the belief in commodity value and there is no indication that it will slow down. Competition between different worldviews leads to conflicts between worldviews if they include a system of reward for their believers. In addition, commodity values are limited by the demand for commodities, which creates competition over profit within capitalism.

The struggle for profit is increasingly focused on quick gains. The past is beyond more commodification and the future is difficult to commodify because it’s uncertain, particularly in the long term. Hence, the commodification of the present is increasing. Commodity values are not inherently evil, if they’re temporary or only occur on a small scale there’s not much to worry about, but once it becomes systematic the relative nature of these values establishes a praxis that overrules the real, subjective evaluation it’s based on and it is this systemic practice we call capitalism.

Anarchism relates to several aspects of the farm including labour, alienated property, territory, patriarchy, ecology, colonialism and animal rights. I’ve not seen a critique like this before and since I’ve spent the majority of my life on a farm I thought I could be the one to write it. My father is a farmer, I’m not, but for the sake of rhetoric I will write as if the ‘I’ of the text is a farmer.

Labour

My labour is not rewarded with paper money and thus not alienated. Instead, there is no clear distinction between my life and my labour. I live where I work. When I repair the buildings on the farm, I labour on both my workplace and my home at the same time. To me there is little difference between mowing the lawn for aesthetic reasons and Read the rest of this entry »

The legacy of Marx is a puzzle of rhetoric, historical movements and drastic political changes that have shaped the lives and deaths of millions of people. Although Marx is most often the target of criticism from economists and politicians, to understand Marx we first need to understand the philosophical basis that led to his thoughts on economy and politics. Marx has also been greatly misunderstood, by both followers and opponents, and the fault lies both with the interpreters and with Marx. The problems stem from the ideological eye wear of commenters, myself included, by him contradicting himself, the large quantity of text he produced, his unpublished works and the complexity of the terminology and the subject matter. To understand Marx’s works and the events that followed in his wake, it is necessary to describe the context thoroughly. For this reason I’m going to present this text in roughly chronological order.

We will begin in Prussia with Marx’s studies of philosophy. Next we follow him to France and to his studies of economics, here I will try to explain his magnum opus, popularly known as Das Kapital. In the last section we will investigate his legacy as a man of international revolution. Although somewhat chronologically structured, thematically this leads us first through philosophy, then economics and lastly politics, interspersed with historical recapitulations when additional context is needed. If you’re only interested in Marx’s economic theories, just read the part entitled Critique of the Political Economy. I end it with a sort of conclusions that contrasts Marx’s focus and work with my own thoughts.

What is an organization? A common answer is that it is the people of which it is composed, but I propose that it is everything but the people. The defining characteristic of an organization is the glue which exists between people, the principles that unite its members, an interpersonal relationship, not the persons themselves. In this text I will try to demonstrate how bureaucracy is the totality of promises in a relationship or principles in an organization, that capital is only one type of such promises and that capital is based on a predicted future value. I consider this to be my second text under the umbrella of post-anarchism after this one.

To the extent that an individual acts in accordance with the commands of the organization, the words of the organization manifest outside our minds. To the extent an individual acts in discord with the bureaucracy Read the rest of this entry »

Nationalism is a generalization of a group of people, someone claiming a common identity. This is comparable to racism, sexism and other attempts at creating monolithic identities. Nationalism is one of the more obviously false generalizations, but let’s take a closer look at the details supporting this identity. The identitarian movement in Europe is the most recent expression of these kinds of generalizations. In theory, these groupings do not cause harm, but in practice any interactions between self-identified members of different groups will result in conflict. Of course, as long as we don’t interact, there won’t be conflict, but that’s another problem.

Post-anarchism means ‘late anarchism’. It is not separate from anarchism, nor is it merely the combination of anarchism and post-structural analysis. I think of it as a reunification, or perhaps synthesis, of anarchism after the split between anarcho-communists and anarcho-individualists, although that is more what it feels like to me than what it actually is. It also attempts to step out of the shadow of state-political anarchism, which predominantly consists of anti-fascism and anti-statist communism. Not to deny that anarchism is political in any sense of the word, just to emphasize that these two modern expressions don’t proportionally represent the basis of anarchist theory as I see it.

Post-anarchism is a deconstruction and reconstruction of anarchism that is still underneath the umbrella of anarchism. It differs from the similarly-named post-left anarchism, which builds on the socialist tradition. Post-anarchism is more like an unhitched river with occasional tributaries ranging from diverse sources, like e.g. existentialism, liberalism, protestantism, Buddhism, physics, neurology, prehistoric cultures and the list goes on. Since anarchism is inherently anti-dogmatic it has no problem with revisionism. However, this is not a platformist attempt. Instead it is in itself an example of the type of organizations or federations it promotes, namely ones that start with one person reaching out to other people with similar thoughts, although not necessarily the same thoughts. Each person or group has their own focus and this is true for this text as well. Basically, post-anarchism, as I present it in this text, is how I think post-anarchism should be defined, meaning I’ve given myself the right to define it after having given myself the right to proclaim myself a post-anarchist.

After re-reading my latest writings a number of times I’ve come to the conclusion that the main feature of my post-anarchism is that it reduces all the problems in anarchist analyses to organizations and so to relationships and so to the subject in the world. This includes property, capital, violence, bureaucracy, representation et cetera. This allows for all previous theories to still be true and relevant and so doesn’t negate the past of anarchism and its bedfellows but rather provides a base structure in which all the different analyses can come to rest in their proper places and in their proper relationships to each other. I believe anarchism should have a place in organizational theory next to Max Weber, game theory and common laissez-faire realpolitik. However, that is a major undertaking and this text is merely an introduction.

I will introduce my view on post-anarchism/anarchism by listing a few topics which I believe are relevant to analyze, without going into too much detail. The list is not meant to be complete and it’s not in any specific order and my ramblings on each topic are meant as kick-starters rather than as closing statements. Since I’m rambling a bit and not trying to clarify many demarcations it helps if you already know what anarchists have focused their analyses on in the past.

Skipping a large chunk of history, people in Europe were criticizing God, the king and the nobility after the Enlightenment. In the 19th century Stirner talked about the equality of individuals, Déjacque about compassion that ignored family and lineage, Bakunin and Proudhon about mutual engagement in labour. Just before WW1, Kropotkin, the last major figure in anarchism, talked about natural organization. More recently, the anarchist critique against oppression has been combined with black liberation, feminism, ecology, LGBTQ, disabilities and various other issues. However, all the combinations haven’t necessarily combined with each other and some of the newest combinations, like anarcho-capitalism, contradict the rest of anarchism. Bookchin stopped calling himself an anarchist because of the anarcho-capitalists and the post-left anarchists have been trying to reformulate the red-and-black current but little has changed since Kropotkin. I’m focusing on theory but just to have it mentioned, anarchists were most active in France and Germany during the 19th century, and then, in chronological order, in the Russian (including in the Ukraine), Spanish and Syrian civil wars. We might also add the many assassinations of the rich and powerful, like Prince Franz Ferdinand or Czar Alexander II, and uprisings like the Zapatistas’ in Mexico and further note that anarchists take part in anti-fascist demonstrations, union strikes, squatting, street occupations et cetera.

For all of these events it’s unclear to which degree and how many of the participants are anarchists. Perhaps that’s also the wrong perspective to start from. Maia Ramnath writes in Decolonizing Anarchism: “decolonizing our concept of anarchism… means that instead of always trying to construct a strongly anarcha-centric cosmology – conceptually appropriating movements and voices from elsewhere in the world as part of ‘our’ tradition, and then measuring them against how much or little we think they resemble our notion of our own values – we could locate the Western anarchist tradi­tion as one contextually specific manifestation among a larger – indeed global – tradition of antiauthoritarian, egalitarian thought/praxis, of a universal human urge (if I dare say such a thing) toward emancipation, which also occurs in many other forms in many other contexts. Something else is then the reference point for us, instead of us being the rderence point for everything else. This is a deeply decolonizing move.” This allows us to look for deeper principles and associate theoretically with prehistoric cultures, the Münster rebellion or the relationship between a boy and a pigeon. It’s also necessary to go beyond labels, whether endonyms or exonyms, like anarchist, nihilist, terrorist, illegalist, revolutionists etc. (with anarchist being the preferred label in my zeit).

I want to change the focus from the state, marxism and anti-fascism and not to have arguments predicated, explicitly or implicitly, on their underlying theoretical assumptions (e.g. free will is foundational to marxism). Here are a few topics I think need to be considered or more in focus to improve the theoretical principles of anarchism:

Home

Identity

Subject

Language

Communication

Ideology

Territory

Cities

Digital Space

Economy as logistics

Power

Freedom

Organization

Bureaucracy

Prison

Revolution

State versus politics

Informal relationships

Representation versus responsibility

Symbolism and metaphysics

Capital as imagined value

Education

The concept of home needs to be deconstructed. Does it need to be a physical territory or a certain building or is it a state of mind? Whatever it is it shouldn’t replace your identity with a generalization that you are like those who are (physically) around you.

Sure, the language and culture in my immediate environment are important to me, but the history of “my” land/country/state/nation/culture is not relevant beyond whatever has survived, in the form of culture and artefacts, into the present. My siblings might have influenced my identity, but mere historical facts have not, and either way it’s not generalizable. We have virtual homes online as well, on platforms like wordpress.com, which represents both a complex infrastructure and a single brand that can be adopted as a symbolic identity for a group.

Should I not open “my” home to you? Why is this piece of the planet mine and not yours? Should we really have toll stations on every threshold? It’s not easy to answer these questions. Similarly, on the one hand I wish the oppressed peoples of the world were freed, but if that means they then create nation-states of their own, then we’re still going to have to deal with that problem. How small units must we divide ourselves into and on which basis? Maybe that question is the wrong one anyway.

Language is important for identity, although not to the extent that ideologies or ideas are shaped solely by words as many ideas exist prior to and next to the words that represent them. You might feel at home when you identity yourself with someone you meet and language matters; social, Read the rest of this entry »

In “Anarchism – Its Philosophy and Ideal” from 1896, Kropotkin, in my opinion, criticizes the holistic view of society as if it itself were an atomic, human soul and consequently any ideas of revolution that rely on this simplistic notion.

“After having fixed all their attention on the sun and the large planets, astronomers are beginning to study now the infinitely small ones that people the universe. And they discover that the interplanetary and interstellar spaces are peopled and crossed in all imaginable directions by little swarms of matter, invisible, infinitely small when taken separately, but all-powerful in their numbers.

It is to these infinitely tiny bodies that dash through space in all directions with giddy swiftness, that clash with one another, agglomerate, disintegrate, everywhere and always, it is to them that today astronomers look for an explanation of the origin of our solar system, the movements that animate its parts, and the harmony of their whole. Yet another step, and soon universal gravitation itself will be but the result of all the disordered and incoherent movements of these infinitely small bodies – of oscillations of atoms that manifest themselves in all possible directions. Thus the center, the origin of force, formerly transferred from the earth to the sun, now turns out to be scattered and disseminated. It is everywhere and nowhere. With the astronomer, we perceive that solar systems are the work of infinitely small bodies; that the power which was supposed to govern the system is itself but the result of the collision among those infinitely tiny clusters of matter, that the harmony of stellar systems is harmony only because it is an adaptation, a resultant of all these numberless movements uniting, completing, equilibrating one another.”